Ethanol Production Will Worsen 'Dead Zone'

Increasing
production of corn-based ethanol to meet alternative fuel goals will worsen the
"dead zone" that plagues the Gulf of Mexico,
according to a new study that adds to the growing list of concerns over the
fuel.

Each year,
spring runoff washes nitrogen-rich fertilizers from farms in the Mississippi River basin and carries them into the
river and the streams that feed it. The nitrogen eventually empties out of the
mouth of the Mississippi and into the Gulf of Mexico, where tiny phytoplankton feed off of it
and spread into an enormous
bloom.

When these
creatures die, they sink to the ocean floor, and their decomposition strips the
water of oxygen. This condition, called hypoxia, prevents animals that depend
on oxygen, such as fish or shrimp, from living in those waters. In recent
years, this so-called "dead zone" has grown to the size of New Jersey—about 20,000 square kilometers (7,700 square miles)—each summer.

Previous
research has shown that corn, one of the three staple crops grown on U.S. croplands, accounts for the bulk of the
nitrogen pollution that fuels the dead zone, said study leader Simon Donner of
the University of
British Columbia.

The most
recent U.S. Energy Bill set a target of 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels
to be produced in the United
States by 2022. Of this, 15 billion gallons
can come from corn starch. Meeting this goal would require devoting more U.S. cropland
to growing corn.

Donner and
his team studied how the conversion of more and more U.S. cropland to corn would affect
efforts to mitigate the growth of the Gulf dead zone, and the news isn't good.

"This
biofuels policy, particularly the fact that they're stressing corn, is just a
death knell for efforts to mitigate the Gulf of Mexico
problem."

Donner's
study, detailed in the March 10 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, adds to the
growing body of research on the potential
ills of ethanol, particularly made from corn. Studies have shown that
producing ethanol could consume more energy than the fuel creates, strain water
resources, and possibly pose a threat to public health.

"I
think the outcome of most of the recent analyses, including ours, is that corn
is just a bad idea," Donner said. "It's just not an intelligent crop
to be using to create fuel."

A
spokesperson at the American Coalition for Ethanol, a non-profit group that
promotes the use and production of ethanol, said the organization had not
reviewed the study and could not yet comment.

The Corn Belt

More than
80 percent of U.S. corn and
soybeans is grown in the Mississippi-Atchafalaya
River Basin, also know as the "Corn Belt." Most of the corn grown there goes not to
our dinner tables, at least not directly, but to make feed for livestock, which
makes corn big business for farmers.

Corn and soybeans
are usually grown in rotation from year to year. While soybeans require little nitrogen
fertilizer, corn "responds to more nitrogen, and since it's a very
valuable crop, and fertilizer isn't that expensive, it's worth applying a lot
of fertilizer," Donner said.

Last year,
rising corn prices and the growing demand for ethanol spurred U.S. farmers to
plant more than 90 million acres of corn for the first time in 60 years. With
more corn comes more nitrogen washing into the Mississippi and the Gulf.

In the
1990s, the EPA and several states created a policy aimed at reducing the Gulf
hypoxic zone to less than 5,000 square kilometers (1,930 square miles) through
voluntary measures. To reach this goal, the policy aimed at reducing nitrogen
runoff by 30 percent, but subsequent research showed that the reduction would
probably have to be closer to 50 percent, Donner told LiveScience. "But that doesn't gel with growing more
corn," he added.

Donner and
his team used U.S. Department of Agriculture data to create a model that looked
at the effects on mitigation efforts of
meeting the 15 billion gallon goal with corn ethanol under a range of planting
scenarios. The study was not funded by any direct sources. Donner is supported
by the High Meadows Leadership and Policy Fund and by the Princeton University
Carbon Mitigation Initiative.

Bad biofuel

When
incentives, such as the demand for corn-based
ethanol, spur farmers to plant more corn, they stop their crop rotation,
planting corn twice in a row on the same field instead of planting soybeans one
year.

Planting
corn, which is heavily fertilized, instead of soybeans, which are not,
naturally means that more nitrogen runs off into streams and rivers in the
basin. This would mean an even higher percentage reduction in nitrogen would be
needed to reduce the area of the dead zone, and Donner isn't optimistic about
that option because agriculture is more valuable to the U.S. economy
than Gulf fisheries, he said.

"I
look at this and it's hard to be optimistic because you really need to break a
subsidy structure, basically, to see these things happen, and so the projection
for the Gulf of Mexico is not good,"
Donner said.

Daniel
Kammen of the University of California, Berkeley,
agrees that the heavy subsidizing of corn prompts farmers to grow it instead of
other potential biofuels crops for which they could not make as much money. Corn
has only been used to make ethanol thus far because "we happen to grow a
lot of it already," he said.

Kammen, who
was not involved with the study says that the projected impact to the Gulf in Donner's
study isn't a surprise and also agrees with Donner that the studies researchers
have done in recent years show that corn isn't the direction to turn.

"Corn
is an awful fuel for ethanol," Kammen said.

Bruce Dale
of Michigan State University, who has worked on the development of ethanol from
cellulose (for example, grasses, wood chips and crop waste ) for the past 30
years says that the industry is increasingly moving away from corn to
cellulosic ethanol because it is more energy efficient and more
environmentally-friendly, but that "without corn-based ethanol, we would
have had a much more difficult time in moving cellulosic ethanol forward."

"There
is a very large national (and international) effort to improve the economics of
cellulosic ethanol, and it will probably eventually far surpass corn
ethanol," Dale wrote in an e-mail.

Donner said
that while his study doesn't advocate any particular approach to biofuels, the
current U.S.
policy isn't going to work.

"Our
study is not, on its own, passing judgment on other biofuels choices, but what
we can tell you is that if the U.S. pursues this energy policy, it will take
what was an already pretty difficult challenge, of reducing nitrogen loading in
to the Gulf of Mexico, and make it pretty much impossible," he said.

Andrea graduated from Georgia Tech with a B.S. in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences in 2004 and a Master's in the same subject in 2006. She attended the Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program at New York University and graduated with a Master of Arts in 2006.